. The measure of the age of the fulness of Christ is the goal and the objective point of the entire development of the Church. It will be attained when every individual shall have become complete in Christ, and therewith also in his own person a pleroma of Christ. In the edifying of the body of Christ, or in the establishment of the Church, therefore, we must work without repose till we all meet in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. In this sense only can it be said that there is a progress in the Church. This continued development of Catholicism the apostle regards as a gradual repletion of the single members of the Church with all the fulness of God,
We have as yet, however, come to know but the one phase of this relation of the Church to Christ, or to the pleroma of the Godhead. The Church is not only destined to present herself at the close of her historical development as the pleroma of him that filleth all in all; she is even now entitled to this attribute, by virtue of her essential character.
On this head we derive instruction from a nearer contemplation of the process of development in which the erection of the Church is completed. "The whole body," says the apostle, meaning the body of Christ himself, "maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in charity." The Church therefore carries within herself, in the inmost recesses of her being, the principle and the germinal power of her whole development. This fundamental principle of Catholicism is Christ himself, who pervades the Church as his body.
There is a subjective and an objective repletion of the Church with Christ. The former progresses gradually, in so far as the single members of the Church assimilate themselves more and more to Christ. The latter is a given state of things from the first. In it consists the most subtle essence of the Church. This objective presence of Christ in her approves itself as the vital power of her growth. The gradual ripening of the Church therefore grows up into Christ (
, Eph. iv. 15) on the one hand, and proceeds from him (
) on the other. From him—that is to say, by means of the vivifying influence of the Son of God, present in the Church, she maketh increase of herself unto the edifying of herself in charity.
It is the same idea, when the apostle characterizes the growth of the Church as an